


ten out of ten - heaven twofold

by tothemovies (jarofactonbell)



Category: Naruto
Genre: Character Study, Gen, an unnamed uzumaki because i'm lazy and can't look up family tree, listen tenten is the best inheritor to the sealing arts FIGHT ME, many artistic liberties were taken with this, which basically meant i made everything up and researched like three things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-11
Updated: 2018-12-11
Packaged: 2019-09-16 08:33:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16950573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jarofactonbell/pseuds/tothemovies
Summary: The villagers tell her she has the eyes of a fighter. A warrior. One who would persist, tooth and nail, until her last breath is expended to saving another.As such, she becomes a kunoichi. To fight, for those who can't. And to heal, for the fallen and hurt.Her birthplace is a nameless little village unrecognised by the smattering of nations around and over its loose borders. Little by little, they will grow. Little by little, she will grow.Little by little. Tenten. It's how she is born and comes to be.Little by little, she will be heaven twofold.“Okay,” she breathes out. Breathes in. “I’ll be okay. I’ll save myself.”





	ten out of ten - heaven twofold

**Author's Note:**

> i'm back on my naruto bullshit and i love my best girl tenten so i have to go and write a backstory for her because she deserves more than a supporting role in the series and obviously i don't know how to write so please just pretend this has more quality than it doesn't

The villagers tell her she has the eyes of a fighter. A warrior. One who would persist, tooth and nail, until her last breath is expended to saving another.

As such, she becomes a kunoichi. To fight, for those who can't. And to heal, for the fallen and hurt. 

Her birthplace is a nameless little village unrecognised by the smattering of nations around and over its loose borders. Little by little, they will grow. Little by little, she will grow.

Little by little.  _ Tenten _ . It's how she is born and comes to be.

The old and burnt down village, once a ghost of a clan vastly powerful, its secrets and seals carrying the hauntings of an art from a period lost in history and carnage, looms over hers. Once the sun sets, the shadows don’t discriminate between what’s standing and what’s burnt down. Ruins cast the same formless pocket of lightless space onto the ground just as a standing village does. Her little village, little by little, becomes a shadow of the rubble - and she fears it will, little by little, crawl towards joining the pile of rubbles as indiscriminate rocks the village foundations would wear down to.

Her name too, means  _ Heaven Heaven _ \- a desperate plea to a utopia her villagers are halfway to accepting that their eyes won’t meet - just like the Heaven they believe in, but have never seen.

She wanders the ruins, invoking ghosts of the past. Asking them if salvation is possible.    
  


Her father accepts the invitation the Hidden Leaf village with no hesitation. Their village is falling to splinters, threads undoing roofs and pillars, and every sunrise, another layer of dust settles over their heads. They will be buried deep under the houses that hold them up and soon they will not be missed, the boundaries between them and the village nearby blurred and inevitably - missing distinctions. 

She had run through these streets, patching whatever tears her fingers could weave into - they stand in her eyes, and crumble as her back turns. Little by little, she cannot be as perfect as the village named her to be the titular being. She is just Tenten, two numbers side by side, and the only perfection she can achieve as her home falls to decay around her are the infallible bullseyes her kunais pinned themselves onto, on the scoreboard in the practice ranges near the desert tundras. No heaven to be found on earth. No salvation for an inevitability.

The ruins don’t talk back. They stay completely still.

Moonlit nights like these, she wishes and wishes for a voice of guidance, for an ancestral ghost to deliver a line of mystic prophecy, to offer a mirage in a sweltering desert, sand and dust all around - she is grasping for straws and carving away blood and dust, nothing in the silently deafening night roaring back at her.

Moonlit nights like these, she sees the apparition. Royal attires, the same robes of long ago princesses that the school in her village mentioned once in passing. The princess with the blood red hair and the swirling chakras, ink splattered onto her sleeves, silently prowling within the ruins as if they are home to her ghostly footprints.

Tenten calls out to her. The princess only shakes her head.   
  


The Hidden Leaf is bigger. Louder. Brighter.  _ Better.  _ Not older, not more familiar, not _hers._

She learns more about the shinobi world. Ninja arts, ninjutsu, taijutsu. Medical ninjutsu. Tsunade, the powerful and intelligent Sannin, one of the Big Three.

She vows to become her. To be the second Tsunade. To mend her village.

Father might have taken her hand and draw her away, far from the village, but she would return, before it is too late.   
  


Father leaves her at the tutelage of Nono Yakushi, a fellow kunoichi, and at the Konoha hospital, and leaves in a rush to return.

She rarely sees him ever since. She doesn’t hold hopes that he will be able to return.  

Nono tells her she should pick up another ninja art, be more well-rounded outside of the medical arts. Tenten goes along with it, wishing to only get stronger. She is learning about sealing, fuinjutsu, a mastery of a country long lost to war and carnage, their whirlpools mirrors of hypnotic genjutsu, swirling, twisting, spiralling into a point of oblivion -  
and beyond.

She thinks of genjutsu and the whispers in the village of the clan that spin those under their compelling eyes into a drugged illusion, of unending whirlpools. Her fingers and palm stray into the ink pot, black water dripping over her arm and skin. Liquid undulates, and seeps onto the paper under her knees. 

Tenten is only nine, but she knows that a little warrior girl ought to not think blood is the colour of sheer black, darker than the lightless night sky, the darkest shade beyond the ink she is learning ninja arts from. A little girl should not know how vivid tragedy spreads before her eyes and should not get the shivers of recollection at the unfamiliar seals her fingers drew with the pad of its tips. 

She recognises the symbols. They are of a language her village converses in and an ancient script elsewhere.

Dead Demon Consuming Seal. 

Tenten gets the pang of  _ again again it’s going to happen again -  _ in the very pit of her stomach. Rising, ink still blotting her fingers and seals still freshly wet, she walks over to the balcony overlooking over the village, tears falling.

Somewhere, a village is engulfed in shadows. The crawl towards joining the pile of rubbles,  indiscriminate rocks wearing down a village and its foundations - all of it is lost in the night.

By the morn, there is another village lost to carnage. But rarely does anyone know of the second and equally as ancient, village that meets the mirrored fate its neighbour had, many years before.   
  


Tenten turns to medical ninjutsu with a mania that frightens even her own skin and hair. It raises the hairs on the back of her skull with a hushed whisper of  _ why are you so obsessed  _ and  _ what can be gained from this.  _ On nights that her tears won’t stop overflowing no matter how hard her fingers pry, the persistent ghost chants the everpresent song in the darkness beyond her lids, when closing her eyes or opening them, she would continue in circles that meet the same ghosts.

_ What is the use of medical ninjutsu, when you have no one left to save? _

She runs in circles, all ending up at the same point and pitching further. All the people and the places that she cares about are in ruins - what is the point of medicine if it can’t revive the dead?

She is tempted, oh so tempted, by the whispers of forbidden jutsus, of reanimating the fallen. But at the cost of salvaging their remains and disturbing their eternal rests, to living and walking ghosts of what they were - her village wouldn’t wish that, wouldn’t wish the burden on her or the disturbance on them.

She trains harder, too hard, insistent at a goal that is so far, so unattainable - that it slowly chips her away inside. Her societal facade never once slips, polite and a little bit silly, nothing suspicious to the weight she carries on her thin shoulders, but the things making her  _ her  _ inside crumbles and falls apart.

She hears the princess of the ruins by home on stormy nights, fingers drawing seals that are only seen by the wind, the tatami doors rattling in their frames and her presence felt by Tenten’s side, never speaking. Tenten wants to save others, so that a tragedy will not befall them like her village, her clan in everything that is blood and beyond, the little nameless village that she carries into a foreign land ringed by evergreen branches, its name a memory on her lips. Her ghost does not speak, does not weep, does not keep or take any mementos from the mortal realm, her red hair soaked in flowing blood fluttering loose and fading with the dawning day.

Tenten shouldn’t search for her, but she had searched for so many things already, that this particular search will not be any different. It is simply another topic in another page and soon the ghost will leave too and she will have nobody left.

Red hair. Light eyes. Seals. A war-torn nation.

Uzumaki clan. The clan that specialises and weaponises seals. Powerful, so much that it became their ruin. She remembers rubbles that bleed ink and scrolls that smudge with something more than dust. Whirlpools that consume whole an entire village and its clan members. A death by their own abilities. 

The princess sits by her threshold, humming a soundless song. Little by little, she’s been coming in closer. Little by little, Tenten will become subsumed in this ghost, carrying out the unfinished deeds she had never fulfilled before her living years were snatched from her. Little by little, she will be eaten whole by the whirlpools pulling at her feet.

“I don’t know how to save you,” she tells the ghost. Wondering if salvation will come to another wretched soul on this barren earth.

The ghost doesn’t reply to her, weaving her fingers in a grip of a brush, writing letters and seals in the unseen air.

“I don’t know how to save myself,” she admits, foolishly believing the ghost can hear and understand her.

Just today Nono told her to take a break from studying. There had been no fruits in her labour. She is running and running around the same spot and sinking under the whirlpools, never surfacing from her point of origin. 

“I just think that something else would suit you much better than this,” the nurse gently extracted her weakly glowing hands from a mere cut that ought to not take the amount of time it did by Tenten’s hands. She is wrecking hell on earth, slandering her own namesake, and leaping miles in her training. Spiralling out of orbit and descending into a dark dark place with only unending pools of inkwells - how does she save herself then?

The princess rises, silent footprints on her tatami mats. One step, two - she walks to the space that Tenten’s unclosed closet door offers, inclining her head inside.

An empty scroll hangs. She mutely retrieves it, unfurling the empty page. White, not black, stares at her. A ghost stands above her head, unblinking.

“What should I do, princess? I don’t know what to do,” she feels young all over and at once, tears almost falling, but she cannot be weak, cannot cry, cannot cannot cannot -

A hand guides her hand to the inkpot by her bed. She dips her finger in, drawing in the shadowy guidance of an Uzumaki princess.

_ Love. Forgiveness. _

The characters glow. Bright bronze, the colour of her chakra.

She gasps, Nono’s words making sense to her.

“Should I - I don’t know anything about fuinjutsu, your highness,” she protests weakly, not breaking even a little from the grip of the princess’s hold.

Red hair moves side to side.  _ No need.  _

“But who will teach me?” She wonders. “I can’t - I can’t be trusted to carry the legacies of two great villages on my back. I can’t even carry my own name properly. How would I -”

Forgiveness bleeds to a warmer orange. The ghost steps away, smiling at last. The ink writes itself, her chakra luminescent. 

_ Ten out of ten, is that not what you are? Heaven heaven, the accuracy of a marksman, little by little. There is nobody out there that can be entrusted with this gift of sealing besides you, Tenten. You have all the guidance you need. I will be with you, always. Your village and mine, we have never left your side. _

In the darkness beyond the moon’s reach, she sees them - all the old and young and in-between youths and the pillars of the town square and the broken bridge by the swirling creek near the border - all of them, silently guarding her.

They have never left. They’ve gone with her to this foreign land and they’ve been with her since the day she was born and until forever more.

“You’re here,” Tenten breathes.

“We never left,” her family smiles, all around her. It’s as if she is herself and everything that was lost all at once. “You are still ours, just as you are yourself.”

Little by little, she will be heaven twofold.

“Okay,” she breathes out. Breathes in. “I’ll be okay. I’ll save myself.”

In the billowing wind, the passed Uzumaki smiles as she picks up her brush and continues poring over the textbook for the seals of weapons.

**Author's Note:**

> be my twitter mutual and scream with me about how the naruto politics are terrible and child soldiers are normalised
> 
> [Twitter](https://twitter.com/jarofactonbell), [Curious Cat](https://curiouscat.me/jenny_benny)


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